Enhancing Library Discovery with Linked Open Data

Steve Meyer will present on the work at UW-Madison to enhance the library catalog with info cards for the authors of bibliographic works. This presentation will demonstrate how Linked Data efforts by library vendors can connect the authority work in library catalogs to data sets on the Web that are not traditionally curated by libraries. Using these data sets enables the library catalog to place bibliographic works in the broader context of their authors' lives. The discussion will be technical in nature and walk through the local implementation of the software at the heart of this data integration. The presentation will dive into the Ruby code that serves as a reference implementation for conducting a bibliographic data crawl of public SPARQL endpoints. Through this overview we hope to foster a conversation about the challenges of working with Linked Data in a real-time web application context, specifically the speed and availability of Linked Data sets. We will assume that you are already familiar with the core Linked Data principles/technologies (such as RDF, graph structures, SPARQL) and general web development methodologies.